For those of you new to Stardock’s games, let me say, welcome! We’re glad you’re here!
For those of you who are veterans, thanks for hanging out with us.
I want to make sure users are fully aware, because it comes up sometimes, that we have intentions/plans for many things and on the other hand we have promises/requirements/obligations.
The former means, we intend to do something but it is not a guarantee. The latter means, yes, it’ll be in there.
Let’s start for the promises for FE:
Now, let’s talk about intentions for FE:
Sorry Frogboy,
when you compare E:WOM which was disastrous by all common measure and then say E:FE will be boring just like it is really casting bad press on the game. It isn't because we expect better graphics, sound or any big bangs like that. Quite the contrary beta 1 of E:WOM was far more fun than anything we've had since release with all the graphics, sound, and playability issues worked out.
If all you did was remake "Master of Magic" for the 21st century it would be "not boring" enough to sustain a generation of gamers. You had the vision when you sold the game to me at PAX and I hope you can regain it and hold onto it for the release of E:FE
I think the game will tell, one way or the other, the future of the Elemental franchise.
Even if FE isn't great, I'd want Stardock to make a GalCiv III.
GalCiv II was an excellent game that holds up very well, but it has some minor flaws. I think Derek and Jon could add to the game in various ways. I could tell with some of the changes in WOM that you were looking and trying to address some things you didn't like about GCII, and I think your ideas would have worked, and I really wish you could have gotten that last patch out last year.
I'm really hoping GCIII comes out in a couple of years- the current Stardock has the potential to make a "genrebuster" game for space strategy.
Around the time I pre-ordered Elemental I was also checking out GalCiv II.
I ended up not buying it as EWoM was a major let down and I thought: "must be more of the same". Well, to be fair people speak generally well of GalCiv II, but I'm personally not a fan of linear techtrees (Laser I -> Laser II etc. etc.), or the kind of humor that seems to be predominant in the game.
Still, if the second game is already very good by general consensus, I imagine even a partial "FE-like flavour-treatment" could do wonders and turn the 3rd installment into a real classic. So while FE is basically still an unknown I say it has the chance to lead to not just one but two successful franchises (or, I mean, more successful than they are at this point).
I made a really sweet mod for GalCiv2:TA that featured 10 classic scifi races with nonlinear tech trees in that sense. I would say, with the mod, it is still the best TBS game I have ever played. Now if the 3rd one has tactical battles on par with FE, that all may change. It was just so easy to fine tune the game to my liking.
The key to making GalCiv better turned out to be limiting the weapons to very low numbers, only giving two of the three to any given race, increasing ship hp by 1000%, and making defenses twice as strong as weapons. Doesn't have anything to do with this thread other than that it got me started on modding and will benefit all of you that buy the game.
I think with all the pains Elemental experienced on its first attempt, many have forgotten how wonderful this game is on a modding level. I have so many mod projects that I postponed last year because of the many changes to the game. When this one is released I am sure it will attract many new modders and restart many of the old projects that were planned. I know I have about 300 quests written up with art to match just waiting for a good game to put them in.
So far the most exciting thing I am wanting to add is new spellbooks and spells. Having an AI that can actually use them with xml modability is going to blow MoM out the water.
Pretty much. It's not fun watching Kerberos shoot themselves in the face. But I don't feel a whole lot of sympathy either. They released something that was so far away from being release-worthy that they deserve what they get.
This isn't a high school project - they took people's money for something that wasn't even close to release worthy. They then spent a couple of days banning people who complained until they were forced into admitting that they screwed the pooch.
All I got out of this debacle was reinforcement that my decision to stop pre-ordering games was a REALLY good idea.
I like your vision of the future and your unbridled optimism.
Hunh.
It seems to me that Stardock is pretty much running a dark humor smear campaign against their own product already. If "it will suck and give you cancer" isn't bad press, then I can't see how "it will be like Elemental" can be considered bad press. Yes, I know they're saying it tongue in cheek.
I'm puzzled. Perhaps Frogboy is just talking out of frustration in which case I can sympathise, the negative reaction to WOM would be enough to make anyone slightly bitter, even if they understand some of the reasons behind that negative reaction.
But if this is meant as a genuine comment then a mistake is being made. The mistake is either in Frogboy's understanding of what parts of WOM people find boring and Frogboy is wrong, strategy fans like me WILL like FE despite finding WOM fairly boring OR the mistake is that Derek and co are developing a very different game from what many of us are hoping for.
The majority of the posts that Derek and Frogboy are making suggest the former because they seem to have grasped the need for tighter more balanced mechanics and more interesting and fleshed out fluff. And really that is all that is necessary. It may not seem a massive difference from within Stardock where they are very close to both games but in my opinion this IS the difference between boring and riveting.
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There are two points here: One, I think there are a lot of people who find turn-based strategy games inherently boring.
Over the years, I don't think most people can possibly imagine how many times I've heard people say how boring Galactic Civilizations is (or even Sins of a Solar Empire).
I am obviously biased but War of Magic v1.4 is pretty decent and if someone finds that "completely worthless" then I doubt FE will somehow make them happy. The difference between WOM at launch and v1.4 is pretty massive and took a lot of criticism to heart.
I agree that there are a lot of game mechanics that simply failed in WOM (IMO) that we have addressed but I can make the distinction between that and "completely worthless". But at the same time, I think there are far too many people who simply get a kick out of keeping the Elemental universe where WOM was when it first shipped.
And two, People have a short memory. In the near term, sure, maybe HOMM VI and SotS2 had "Elemental-like" launches. But if I've learned anything, there is no permanence when it comes to reputation.
Elemental itself had a MOO3 launch and MOO3 really just a Star Control 3 level debacle which itself was more akin to the Strike Commander launch and on and on and on.
The point is, consensus changes with time. If it didn't, we wouldn't treat MOM as a classic -- it was unfinished when it shipped in a day before Internet patching. You couldn't actually lose at that single player game -- if you were able to get through it without crashing. There wouldn't be a huge Eve Online fan base which had a pretty disastrous launch. And most of us love Elder Scrolls (or have since Oblivion) but were completely unaware with how people felt about Daggerfall.
There is no permanence. What people remember is the LAST thing you did. The last thing this team did was WOM and we have to deal with it.
Hard to disagree with any of that.
I'm cautiously optimistic about FE based on what I've heard and that means I'm confident that FE will be a better game than WoM (regardless of how good or bad one thinks WoM is). That means I'm hoping it will be quite possible to be meh about WoM but ecstatic about FE. Time will tell!
I guess I will just let my actions speak for itself. I never bought WOM, but nonetheless I am still here. I *want* FE to succeed, and I'm back here all the time waiting to see if Elemental is finally worth investing my time in (note: I said time, not money. Time is the more expensive commodity). And yet here I am, spending my time on the Elemental forum. Go figure....
p.s. I think those "Galactic Civilizations is boring" buffs tend to be the computer gaming equivalent of dumb jocks. They've probably got a headset microphone and are spending all night blowing people up in Halo 3, who can probably score a head shot with a sniper rifle in 0.25 seconds. I was into GC2 because I was fascinated with the math and time value of money.
There are things in GC2 that could be made less dull/boring, but it's an overall very good to borderline great game, with some flaws that Brad has mentioned and wished he could fix.
I think one of the issues with WOM was that I think the differences between a space game and fantasy game were underestimated.
MOM was the first computer game I ever bought actually. I played a near release copy of it and I remember it crashing constantly, causing no shortage of frustration. I would save the game every couple of minutes. It didn't stop me from loving the game then, but I doubt I would be so forgiving now. Then again, patching is a much more streamlined process now (mostly). We have much higher expectations from games. I remember making a sandwich during the 7 floppy disk install which took over an hour for my 386.
As for WOM, I pre-ordered the game and was disappointed (not angry) about it. I probably speak for a few people when I say that the nostalgia fed hype of the game's release definitely caused me to have some unrealistic expectations of Elemental being an instant classic. Personally, I don't regret my purchase, because I like the idea and passion behind Elemental. The outright negativity, anger and hate of the Internet against Stardock was shocking, but not surprising.
To me the Internet is a convenient place for people to safely exercise their desire for instant gratification and feelings of self-entitlement. Patience is something that developers can preach, but only expect from a minority of the gaming community. In the end, the people that are in it for the long haul in regards to Elemental's development will support Stardock and the others won't. To those who are inbetween, I will say this: There will be fewer and fewer opportunities for independent companies like Stardock to create games like this. Understand that the TBS genre is a niche audience, particularly when not under the Civilization and HOMM umbrellas. The big companies will continue to churn out games in the most profitable areas and we have already seen lots of compromises when it comes to game depth and appealing to a wider audience (Dragon Age 2). I would expect this trend to continue, so think twice before you do your part to degrade the reputations of the smaller companies.
Stardock: I would say have some peace of mind by knowing that there are people who recognize the importance of your game developments. A bad game release can linger for awhile, but in the end, people that are passionate about games remember the end result above all else.
Just some input from a long-time lurker on the subject.
I think the reason TBS is a small market is because PC technology is still too primitive to make these games reach their full potential. Turn times, map size, and game depth are really just cut short due to the hardware we are forced to use in this century. I think a few generations down the line we will see TBS come back in a big way. Of course all the games will be in Chinese, but that is a different issue altogether.
Another issue with TBS is profitability. These games are expected to be very moddable so it's hard to nickel and dime successfully.
The one advantage you have is that the market is affluent, so piracy rates are lower (piracy is primarily a function of lack of wealth)
Niche genres probably need to be priced higher then they are, though the expansion model takes care of that. GC2 was effectively $90 or so once you counted all the expansions.
The problem I have with TBS is the time it demands from you. Your typical RTS game is over in like, 45 minutes? A large TBS game, 45 minutes is one turn.
Too true tetleytea.
How does that matter? You play 10 RTS games over the course of a month or 1 TBS game.
To me, that's all the difference. I enjoy the occasional diversion while in class or at work thinking about whatever the situation was in the TBS game I'm in the middle of.
"The problem I have with TBS is the time it demands from you. Your typical RTS game is over in like, 45 minutes? A large TBS game, 45 minutes is one turn."
One solution could be to have something like in Hearts of Iron (Paradox's game, I think this is the name of it) where you assign a 'general' that's incharge of a certain area/territory that's then controlled by the ai for you (this was also done in at least some of the ROTK games) - so it could be your hero 'Big John' would be put in charge of your 3 cities on the Eastern side of your Empire under low aggression orders to build up & send reinforcements to 'Lance Kalsas' that's in charge of your 3 cities on the Western side of your Empire (the front line) that's been given orders to 'govern as seen fit/attack at will'. This type of setup removes alot of the micro managment of a large Empire resulting in much shorter (& sometimes interesting) games. So a 'General BlackHog' would actually be a general in charge of a certain 'army' / his own resources.
Just like Sovs, different Generals would have different ideas of what the best tac/strategic plan was & act accordingly
Civ and Galciv both have governors, which do a similar thing. It's just an attempt to reduce the micromanagement. Neither really overhauls the TBS genre, and the governors normally don't play as well as a human would. I never use them when the game's not already "won". IMHO in order for this sort of thing to work, the governors have to be mandatory.
Earlier I think it was Jon Shafer who criticized Civ V's game design--something about they might as well just put a great big button that says, "Win the Game". Sounds like he would not particularly be a fan of mandatory governors.
Jon and I have talked a lot about Civ V design stuff. I happen to think Civ V is a very well designed game. It's not a game that Stardock could have made. I would have vetoed the 1 unit per tile feature because we (Stardock) aren't capable of creating a path finding system that would prevent the turns from becoming ridiculously long and I wouldn't have been able to write an AI that would manage those units intelligently without it taking a very long time.
When you design something on paper, the biggest challenge is knowing what your development team is capable of doing. The original (ORIGINAL) WOM design was not something Stardock's dev team at the time could pull off. It could -today- but the Stardock dev team of today is very different. We didn't have the people or background to make the design we wanted. As we changed it and stripped it down, it ceased being what was intended and even stripped down was not ready, as a technology, for wide release (i.e. fell into "works fine on our machines").
WOM, even when it was fixed up, which happened reasonably good, would never be a great game because, looking back, the things that would have made it great were left on the cutting room floor as things we just couldn't pull off.
To keep with the Civ V analogy, if, for instance, having 1 unit per hex tile were a core part of the game's design and the team turned out unable to pull it off and then had to cut that core feature, you could end up with a crippled game design. And that, in essence, is the story of WOM. That's what happens when you don't take project management and full-time dedicated designers seriously.
When we were doing Demigod with GPG and I met Mike Marr (the designer) I remember asking him "So this is all you do? Design the game?" and thinking how wasteful that was. Meeting him helped change that opinion but it was with Elemental: WOM that we learned the hard way that yea, there is value to having people whose jobs don't involve art or coding or testing.
Even now, Stardock is actively searching the industry for seasoned lead developers. It's a non-trivial thing to solve. I've had to rob resources from the software side of the biz (which is a major no no since that's the part that pays the bills) to make some things happen. We have great game developers here but what is expected of PC games in 2011 is pretty insane and if you have a tiny budget, all the more insaner.
1UPT IMHO is best served by a greedy algorithm. All your units have a desired destination, except now your paths are boolean buckets (i.e. your paths are composed of tiles which can be 1 (filled) or 0 (empty)). Rather than do a brute force relaxation algorithm to find the optimal AI (which would mean ridiculously long turns), I would pick my slowest, but most heavy-hitting units to move first and get first divs on the buckets. Actually, in the spirit of greediness, I would probably give them first divs on their entire path. Then I would grade my units progressively lower based on power, speed, and proximity to target. Then I would route the units one-by-one in descending order of grade. Then after I'm done routing them all I might do a second pass and do a little re-pathing based on which units are best on which terrain: if a unit gets denied its favorite terrain because its path is filled by another not-so-good unit, I might switch path orders. The reason I would choose the slowest, most powerful units is because I don't want runaways, e.g. all my light cavalry charging the enemy front lines while my heavy infantry is still 3 turns away. The slowest units need first divs on the paths; the faster units can always catch up. And besides, the slower units tend to have better defense bonuses in the rougher terrain.
So yeah, I don't think greedy would be that slow. That's a popular route computer scientists choose when the brute force space grows prohibitively large. In hardware EDA, they encounter a similar problem in place-and-route (a.k.a. P&R). It's a similar algorithmic problem in that they are routing electrical wires--obviously you are not allowed to short wires together.
I am starting to get why CivV has such terrible AI during a war. Besides the fact that it never builds enough troops during a war, it doesn't move them efficiently.
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